What New Orleans Taught Me | Hacker News Reader

What New Orleans Taught Me

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79 pointstintinnabula56 comments

Speaking of community, there is a really nice little tech community going strong in New Orleans that I think reflects the culture talked about here. If you are ever in town you should stop by an event https://www.noladevs.org/.

Feel free to reach out to me if you want some intros.

Any recommendations on which meetups are worth attending?

Typically every Tuesday night at the Rusty Nail bar at 7 PM. A lot of the community meets for so-called Hacknight.

Hack night is the generic networking meetup at the rusty nail. It's way more casual. No presentations or organizing. below-c-level and frontend party are generally more organized and have talks. All the meetups happen before (and geographically near) to hack night on the same night. So you can generally do both. See a meetup then walk to the bar with everyone for the networking event.

Also a link on that noladevs site to the community slack. That one has been going since early Launchpad days....what? 14 years ago?

NOLACon is nice too. I'm down to meetup for Xbox Game development (I have a DevKit) and hacking stuff. The sites Slack invite link is dead btw.

yes, the local security community punches above their weight i think.

BSides Nola is a little more than a week away https://nolabsides.com/nolabsides-main

I’ve traveled to NOLA for work over the years and have fallen in love with the city. The first time I went there, I just thought it would be a tourist trap which, of course, it partially is but you have to go beyond that to find all the wonderful things NOLA has to offer. What draws me to NOLA is the “grit” which is both good and bad. You can eat delicious and unique meals but there are other restaurants where you’ll get ripped off. The live music is simply second to none. My favorite by far is Frenchman street. Some memories I cherish is seeing the New Orleans Jazz Vipers at the Spotted Cat Cafe. I was sitting so close to the band once that I was basically sitting among the musicians. It’s the authenticity of NOLA I adore. But you’ve got be careful, and to be honest I don’t always feel safe there. When walking back to my hotel through the French Quarter at 2am, I walk as fast as I can and in the middle of the street so I am not mugged. Anyway, it is a place I’ve grown to love despite and perhaps because of the rough edges. Edit: Also the NOLA locals are fantastic people!

> You can eat delicious and unique meals but there are other restaurants where you’ll get ripped off.

Your risk of getting railroaded as a tourist drops dramatically if you stay away from the French Quarter. If you also stay away from any location the hop-on/hop-off buses stop, that drops almost to zero.

I live close enough to go 6-8 times per year. We only go into the Quarter to dine at restaurants that we know (and usually were recommended by natives) or shop at a handful of places whose only location is there.

My first "date" with my wife was almost exactly described by the Parachute song New Orleans: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKknLB8LXCQ

She spent her late teens and early adulthood living in the city, and moved back after living all over the place several times during her life; and so when we met we just got in her car and she took me to all the places that were meaningful to her: shopping on Magazine Street, Ursuline Academy where she went to high school, a book signing with one of her classmates, coffee and beignets at Café du Monde, lunch at Domilise's, etc. It was important to her because she felt that to understand New Orleans was to understand her as a person better. The major detail from the song that was missing was there were no roses bursting through cracks in the sidewalk, but sometimes there was jasmine growing along the fences and walls adjoining the sidewalk and as you walked along you'd just be bathed in the smell of it. Random marching or jazz bands do sometimes pass right by you. Everything you said about the city is true. It's sometimes dangerous, and I wouldn't want to be out in the wrong place at night, but it's honest and raw and real in a way most cities, even my beloved Boston, are not.

Thank you for sharing that beautiful comment. Yes, there really are random marching bands about. I also enjoyed the Parachute song which I didn't know. This video kind of captures NOLA for me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6E_s1oO4YQ. (Also love Boston, but for completely different reasons.)

As someone who just signed a PNS on a condo in the French Quarter yesterday (what timing for this HN post!), I'm looking forward to finding that balance between the universal and the intimate - I come from New England, where the elitism and tribalism the author speaks of is easy to find, and easier to get sucked into.

I've been here a few times now, mostly frequenting the Quarter, Marigny, the Warehouse District, and the Garden District -- each seem (to me) to be their own special, slower spin on different areas of the country. I'm sure some will disagree, but to me, the French Quarter, while obviously having tons of European influence, feels a lot like a New England town (except the weather of course!). Marigny (again, to me) feels almost SoCal-esque, with its small bungalows and arts focus. The Warehouse District feels like a rust belt city, very industrial but charming, and the Garden District feels straight out of Georgia or South Carolina, the most southern. All this is to say it all makes New Orleans a very special place.

Marigny reminds me of San Fransisco a little. Just less urban looking, less busy and much more intimate.

welcome! if you're looking for some people to connect to or get help from check out the local dev community site: http://noladevs.org/

I grew up in Louisiana and have been to NOLA a lot (also studied at Tulane). While there's NOLACon etc. there isn't much tech here and not a lot of jobs. Lots of us live in poverty. Laissez faire and corrupt politics have been in Louisiana for a long time. Lots of public schools are closing to be replaced by private schools. NOLA floods pretty good every 5ish years, so it's not a good place to live imo + the insurance and crime rates are very high.

However, I've lived in Chicago, Austin, KY and Omaha. I moved back and honestly I like it here. I hated it when I grew up, but the cost of living is cheap and the food is good. I got my real ID here back in 2016 when I got my learners permit which surprised people in Chicago. Also we got phone app IDs pretty early. It's getting a little better.

My biggest complaint with NOLA is absolutely the school system. There were too many people taking advantage of the destruction of Katrina post hurricane, and the government was shamelessly complicit in the cash grab. Middle and upper middle class kids benefitted immensely, while the poor were further tracked into shitty schools for the most part.

When we were evaluating places to settle as adults, the schools are what kept us from stopping when we were there.

The best part about New Orleans is that it's an absolutely terrible investment. At any summer a massive hurricane could wipe it off the face of the planet.

Why this is great is because it makes it unattractive for rich real estate developers and rich gentrifiers from moving here and wiping out the culture by turning it into strip malls and suburbia like the rest of the country.

Being a native New Orlean-ean its so strange to hear people talk about New Orleans.

People have these itemized buzz word lists of visited cultural touchstones that they drop in conversations to sound hip about the city.

Its very clinical... like an all white person second line.

Gentrifiers who sliced off the face of the city and are wearing it like a skin suit.

Didn't grow up in the city, but relatives came from there, I still have an "ear to the ground" so to speak, am Saints fan and visit occasionally.

Pros: - Great food

- History (relative to the US at least)

- Laid back culture

- Decent public transit. Not as good as NYC or SF, but in the city and even outlying areas like Metarie the streetcar gets you alot of places

- Interesting architechture in places like the Garden District and French Quarter

- All-in-all, one of the most unique places in the US

Cons:

- Weather is shyte, although winters tend to be mild (ironically it can get cold at times, even worse than say the SF Bay)

- K-12 education outside of private and parochial Catholic is mostly, not good

- The politics. Depending your perspective, you get the worst of both worlds (batshit insane conservatives running the state vs. corrupt liberals running the city)

- Every other commercial you see will be for personal injury lawyers. The tort decisions there are out of control and insurance rates are high.

All this is probably OK for childless young adults. I'd think twice before settling down there though

Chip Forstall takes care of it all!

Morris Bart is on your side!

Morris is not splashing out for the musical talent unlike Chip

He isn't buying jello shots like Gordan McKernan either

Now this I hadn’t heard

In Omaha, there's a bar that records the number of jello shots purchased by the fans of each team every College World Series. When LSU was in the CWS, they bought a record amount of jello shots, obliterating the old record. That's because McKernan and Todd Graves (of Raising Canes fame) were taking turns buying thousands of them and giving them away to the LSU faithful.

I met Morris Bart at some kind of party when I was a teenager. He told me that advertising is the most powerful force in the universe.

He’s not right but he’s not wrong, I was waiting for something in one of the city’s offices once and he came in and people in the middle of much more complicated legal affairs recognized him and started begging him for help. He brushed them off and went through to do whatever his business was.

Plastic surgery’s a pretty powerful force in his universe too, this was only a few years ago but he looked just the same as when I was seeing his ads on tv in the eighties all the time.

I sat in a jury for a civil lawsuit between an employee, a company, and the insurer for the company. Guy was driving a company vehicle for work and got T-boned on a rural highway by some kids riding through cane fields. His line of work was cleaning those giant shipping vessels, which requires you to climb about 60 feet vertically. Well, the company didn't want to pay more for insurance, so they tried to get the guy to take a foreman gig so they could skimp on his payout.

Long story short, the counsel for the plaintiff was VERY good, made the insurance company's people look like amateurs, and was successful in pleading his case and getting everything he asked for. Very nice fellow, and I didn't notice until driving over a shipping canal that his face was plastered on a giant billboard for maritime injury cases, lol.

> they tried to get the guy to take a foreman gig so they could skimp on his payout.

That’s federal law; nothing to do with the company or New Orleans.

Glossing over a lot of nuance, but if you can offer the person what amounts to a lifetime (or at least long-term???) job at the same or better pay that they can reasonably do with their new disability, there is no standing for a workers comp claim.

The hell it doesn't. They didn't accommodate his new disability. The foreman on the crew had to make the same climb in the same gear, they just weren't doing the cleaning. This is a guy who tore and broke every joint and bone in both legs and had two separate locations where they had to fuse his spine.

They wanted to offer him the job so they could fire him for not performing because they didn't want their premium to increase.

New Orleans is not a place I would settle in, but it's one of the most interesting places I've ever visited in the U.S.

- Setting for Gabriel Knight I: Sins of the Fathers. The most atmospheric game I've ever played. It was basically a tour of New Orleans (St Johns cemetery, Lake Ponchartrain, Tulane, etc.)

- Yes, food. Even though Antoine's, Commander's Palace, Mothers are touristy, they're the best touristy food I've ever had. Then there's the usual suspects like Cafe du Monde beignet's, jambalayas, crawfish etouffees, gumbos, po-boys and mufulettas.

I also wandered out to Metarie (which I learned was pronounced Meta-ree, not Me-taree). It's a suburb.

America doesn't really have any other destinations quite like it.

Also The Colonel’s Bequest

The best NOLA-based game is NORCO. Fight me.

Norco is in St. Charles Parish, not Orleans.

Sure but if you scope it down too much it becomes the only game about that place which kind of takes the fun out of the discussion.

Yeah injury lawyers are prevalent, because they can get paid $50k and under without having a jury. Lots of lawyers conspire with judges to get favourable decisions.

It’s apparently the murder capital of America too [0]

[0] https://nypost.com/2022/09/18/new-orleans-becomes-murder-cap...

It was much worse back then and pre pandemic. In practice if you have a good relationship with your neighbors, they will probably warn you when the shooting is about to start.

Significant plus! My neighbors have never, ever warned me before a shooting starts

Public transit is abysmal in SF. The fact that it exists by no means qualifies it as "good".

I just moved to Seattle after being in New Orleans for about a month and I already miss nola. There’s really nothing else like it in America. I’m especially missing the cheap public transit and good dive bars, Seattle is lacking with both of those things

If only the cheap public transit was reliable and punctual. It is amusing when the bus driver stops and gets out to buy crawfish though.

They did that in SF (Mission District) when I lived there, too (not crawfish, but ice cream or such).

it’s all part of the experience lol. I’d imagine I’d stop finding these quirks amusing pretty quickly if I actually lived there and got over the honeymoon phase. Also the self affirmation messages they play on the buses were kinda surreal the first time I heard them after a long night on bourbon street

Believe me I’ve heard locals and visitors cursing the message out

I really, really like New Orleans and this fits my 2 year experience so far.

2025 makes it hard to be far from SF for me again because there's so much interesting stuff getting built. FOMO follows me around though.

Glad to hear you’re enjoying it! Would love to meet up some time if you ever get the chance.

I've spent a lot of time in NOLA over the past 5 years as I have some investments here. The quality/price of housing and quality of life in the Uptown and Audubon Park areas is fantastic. I'm very surprised more remote engineers/workers haven't discovered it. Yes, hurricanes are a thing.

I would consider raising a family in those areas as well. Beautiful and walkable.

I live here part time now. I tell people New Orleans is a different country - has to be experienced.

New Orleans has been a "different place" for a long time...

My great-great-uncle told me about driving there with a buddy during college--in the 1920s.

I think one of the early Harriet Potter books included the reference to a man who spent a year there in his youth and had the indiscretion to have experimented with alcohol.

Just a very different place from the rest of the US South, and AFAICT, different from any other place in the US

> Everyone thinks their early 20s were the golden age of the place they lived

Nope. This person is not terribly insightful.

> the more rigid monochronic frame that dominates the rest of the country. In polychronic cultures, time is seen as cyclical and relational rather than fixed

Maybe in brand new suburbs, but where else? This person is detached from the rest of our communal reality and is inventing a new one!

did they mention abundant specialized prostitution? like San Francisco too

Specialized?

Formatting of the photos and new paragraphs looks off FYI. It’s distracting enough to make the article difficult to read.

I see that the right edge of the photos are cutoff on mobile, but the bulk of the image still appears. The paragraphs might be indented a bit more than usual, but otherwise they're clean and fit entirely on the screen.

Not sure how a barely-chopped photo edge makes the actual article "difficult to read".

Hmmm - not sure why either! Probably just a warped reading style.

Didn’t mean to come off as rude.

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